Showing Press in Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act Campaign

The first time Noor Salman told her aunt about the abuse she’d suffered at the hands of her husband was also the first time she found herself free of him. It was June 2016, just five days after her husband, Omar Mateen, had walked into Pulse nightclub in Orlando and opened fire, killing 49 people and injuring many others before he died in a shootout with police.Read More

For decades, domestic violence survivors have been criminalized, prosecuted, and imprisoned for acts carried out by their abusive partners.
In January, 30-year-old Noor Zahi Salman was arrested in connection with the 2016 Pulse nightclub massacre that left 49 people dead and many more injured and traumatized. Salman’s name had, until then, been largely unfamiliar to the U.S.Read More

Bresha Meadows has been in jail for 175 days, accused of killing her father. Police say she took a gun and shot her father in the head while he was sleeping. Bresha is awaiting trial on charges of aggravated murder, but her mother says she’s not a criminal — she’s a hero.Read More

Christina Wall spent 19 months at Riverside Correctional Facility for a first-degree felony. While she was in prison, she met with many different organizations that promised to help her re-enter society when she’d done her time. When she got out in June of 2015, Wall, a first-time inmate originally from New Jersey, tried to get in contact with all of these groups.Read More

To the Editor:
Re “Serving as a Role Model During a Father’s Absence” (The Neediest Cases, Dec. 21):
It’s nice to see young Jaylen benefit from the MentorCHIP program. But children whose parents are incarcerated need regular visits with their parents. Studies show that children’s emotional, scholastic and social adjustment improve when they have regularly scheduled visits to alleviate the pain of losing a parent.Read More

A proposed New York State law could offer justice to women who fight back against abusive partners. Kim Dadou is doing everything she can to make it a reality.
On the night of December 17, 1991, Kim Dadou’s boyfriend, Darnell Sanders, drove up to her mother’s house. He waited for her in his car, parked on the street.Read More

Here’s a riddle: Would you rather pay $10 dollars, one time, or $11, repeatedly, for the rest of your life?
Anessa Rabbit (photo: Andrea Morales for the NYT)
If you chose the first option, you acted logically. If you chose the second option, you acted the way the United States government acts when it imprisons female drug addicts.Read More

On October 6, 2016, 15-year-old Bresha Meadows will appear in an Ohio family court for the death of her abusive father. Meadows had spent a lifetime watching her father hit, kick, shove and control her mother. If her mother tried to leave, her father often threatened that he would kill her and their three children.Read More

photo credit: Melissa Jeltsen
NEW YORK — LadyKathryn Williams-Julien’s first childhood memory is of her father punching her mother in the face. She was 6. Her mother fell to the ground, where Williams-Julien was already cowering. They were eye-to-eye, mother and child, both trembling with fear.
“Her whole face was covered with blood,” she said quietly, sitting at the kitchen table in her apartment in the Bronx.Read More